“He wouldn’t do that,” Ellie said. “If he says Eckels was here, then he was here.” She hadn’t bothered filling Donovan in on the specifics of her relationship to Peter Morse, and he’d been polite enough not to pry.
“Hopefully we’ll get an explanation soon enough,” Donovan said. He had called Simon Knight, who had covered his butt once again by pointing them to Deputy Chief Al Kaplan for guidance. As the head of Manhattan South Detective Borough, Kaplan had been the one to pull the strings necessary to move Ellie into homicide, and now here she was on his radar again already. Kaplan was unnerved enough to hear that the DA’s office would be dismissing the murder charges against Myers in the morning. He wasn’t about to ignore the possibility-however remote-that one of his own had something to do with this.
The Deputy Chief had been the one to make the call. As the three of them sat waiting in her pigsty of a living room, investigators from the DA’s Homicide Investigation Unit, accompanied by Internal Affairs, were on their way to Eckels’s house in Forest Hills.
DONOVAN WAS PLACING his fourth call to the HIU investigator. “Any sign of him?…I know you said you’d call. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to call you every thirty minutes for an update… Good. Thanks for staying on it.”
He flipped his phone shut and looked at his watch. “Almost one in the morning. Is Dan Eckels the kind of guy who stays out until one in the morning, even on a Friday night?”
Ellie had that discomforting, racing feeling caused by a combination of sleep deprivation and an overdose of adrenaline. “I don’t know anything about the man.”
She remembered Flann McIlroy’s description of a lecture from Lieutenant Eckels: Just imagine the mean, gruff boss in any cop movie you’ve ever seen.
She had come to assume in the short time she’d known her lieutenant that he behaved that way to compensate for his own insecurities. Now she wondered if the adoption of a well-worn and familiar persona wasn’t the perfect cover for a much darker secret.
“I’d feel a lot better if we’d found him by now,” Donovan said.
“Me too.”
She had finally convinced Rogan to go home shortly after midnight, with a promise that she’d call with any news. The more time that passed without any sign of Eckels, the less implausible of a suspect he seemed.
“If he weren’t a cop, you’d be yelling at me to wake up the most conservative judge I could find to sign a search warrant for his house.”
“I wouldn’t yell.”
“Beg?”
“In your dreams.” Ellie sat in her off-white armchair with her knees pulled up tight in front of her, wondering why she wasn’t pushing harder. If they were right, Eckels had already killed at least five women, two on her watch. If they were right, he could at that moment be selecting his next victim, or planning to come after Ellie directly.
But maybe they were wrong.
If they were wrong, and she led the charge to execute a search warrant at Dan Eckels’s house, her career would be over. Tomorrow it would be good-bye homicide unit. Within a year, she’d be chased out of the department altogether. Another cop could go gypsy, relocating to another city to start anew, but not her. She was Ellie Hatcher, that chick on Dateline and in People magazine whose whack job of a father offed himself with his service weapon.
Ellie trusted her gut. She trusted it so much that she’d kick down the door on Eckels’s house personally if her gut told her it was the right thing to do, damn the consequences.
But it wasn’t the devastating consequences of a mistake that had her tucked into a ball in her armchair. Her gut was telling her she was missing something. Her head knew the facts, but her instincts were telling her that there was another way of looking at them. Like a child’s blocks that could be formed into an infinite number of completed shapes, the facts would tell a different story if she could somehow rotate and rearrange them until they fell into the correct combination.
She just wasn’t ready to pull the trigger on Eckels. They had people watching his house. They had investigators quietly calling Eckels’s friends in the department to see where he might be-a girlfriend’s, a late-night poker game, some explanation for his disappearance after the mysterious drop-in at Ellie’s apartment.
Another hour, she thought. Ninety minutes. Two-thirty in the morning would be the tipping point. Two-thirty was late enough to confirm her suspicions. She still had ninety minutes to see what she was missing.
“Don’t you have an apartment of your own that you need to get to?” she said.
“I do in fact have an apartment, but I have absolutely no desire to go there right now. I’m staying here until you kick me out.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t need you to protect me. Look, big gun,” she said, pointing to the holster she’d tossed on her kitchen counter.
“If you think I want to be here so I can protect you, you have seriously overestimated my manliness. I’m a pencil-neck lawyer. You’re doing all the protecting tonight.”
“You can’t stay all night.” Somehow the words came out in a voice that suggested precisely the opposite. Max heard it, too.
“Don’t think of it as all night. Just until you kick me out. If morning stumbles along before then, so be it.”
“I’ve known you for all of three days.”
“Yeah, but think of how much time we’ve spent together.” He looked at his watch. “Like, fourteen hours, today alone. That pretty much makes this our third or fourth date.”
“A date administering polygraphs and figuring out if my lieutenant is trying to kill me.”
He rose from the couch and walked toward her. “Well, that’s just how I roll. A date with Max Donovan is always an adventure.”
She could tell he was at least as exhausted as she was, and he was forcing himself not to look worried. And in that moment, Ellie-who so often preferred to be alone-found herself happy he was there. Here was a man who might-maybe, possibly, one day-actually understand her.
When he knelt against her chair, she did not stop him. And when he leaned in to kiss her, she decided to stop thinking and to let things simply happen.
CHAPTER 45
LIEUTENANT DAN ECKELS buttoned his trench coat as he walked through the marble-floored lobby of the Trump Place apartment complex, then climbed into his black Dodge Charger. He pulled onto the West Side Highway, feeling slightly less stressed than he had a few hours earlier. Marlene had that effect on him.
It had been four years since he’d met Marlene, and if someone had predicted then the odd relationship he shared with her today, he would have called the paramedics for a straitjacket.